Yes, as in CD. With singers, guitars, accordions.

In what may be among the lesser-known deterrents exercised by our nation's security forces, the Border Patrol is deploying up-tempo Mexican folk songs about tragic border crossings to dissuade would-be illegal immigrants. The agency has paid - how much, it won't say - a Washington-based advertising company to write, record, and distribute an album, Migra Corridos, to radio stations in Mexico. The title, its makers say, is intended to mean "songs of the immigrant," but migras is commonly understood as a code word for Border Patrol in much of Mexico.

The first CD of five songs was recorded in 2006 and distributed in the last two years. Another CD was scheduled to be ready this spring. There are also tentative plans for a collection of similarly themed songs with styles of music more geared toward would-be illegal immigrants from Central America.

Many of the stations in Mexico that play the songs and the listeners who request them are seemingly oblivious to who is behind the bouncy ballads of death, dashed dreams, and futile attempts at manhood.

"Before you cross the border, remember that you can be

just as much a man by chickening out and staying.

Because it's better to keep your life

than ending up dead."

The music is part of the Border Safety Initiative, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's push to squash smuggling and increase safety along the border. As part of that effort, the Border Patrol launched No Mas Cruces en la Frontera, a campaign aimed at educating communities with many potential illegal immigrants about the dangers of crossing.

Illegal immigrants can encounter severe hazards on their journey: professional smugglers and bandits who beat, rob, rape and abandon them; bitingly cold or scorching temperatures; snakes, scorpions; drowning; and death by dehydration or exhaustion.

No Mas Cruces en la Frontera (which means both "no more crossings on the border" and "no more crosses on the border") has primarily relied on newspaper, television, and billboard ads. In one poster, men walk in a line, with some of their shadows appearing as crosses. In another, someone collapses in a seemingly endless desert.

"Before crossing to the other side," the poster advises, "remember that the burial plots are full of the valiant and the macho."

The most recent twist on the media blitz is Migra Corridos, a brainchild of Elevacion, a Washington-based advertising boutique that specializes in Hispanic market advertising. Elevacion, which had already been working on the border program, sold the Border Patrol on the idea of songs-as-deterrents.

The five-song album draws on corridos, popular Mexican narrative ballads with roots in Spain's Middle Ages. Reenergized in recent decades by popular Mexican groups, the genre reverberates deeply with Mexican and Mexican American communities, said Martha Chew Sanchez, the author of Corridos in Migrant Memory and an associate professor at St. Lawrence University in New York.

The songs, Sanchez said, humanize the experiences with tales of love, death, migration, globalization and social and political events. More recently, there has been an explosion in the popularity of narcocorridos - ballads that recount the drug traders, their exploits and, often, their deaths. Among the perils mentioned on Migra Corridos: a cousin who dies from dehydration, a mother who is raped and beaten by a child-killing smuggler, one man's suffocation in an airtight tractor-trailer.

Whatever the subject, the songs can strike a chord with listeners, as long as they tell a compelling narrative, Sanchez said. "If it's a good story, the people will like it. And no matter what generation, they will listen to it."

It's difficult to measure how effective the corridos have been in aiding the government's overall effort, but the Border Patrol's Ciliberti cites a steady decline in deaths and rescues along the Southwest border. He attributes it to the agency's broader approach to illegal immigration.